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Schools Chancellor Carranza: Playing the Race Card
May 27, 2019
It might be a wee bit too much to call Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza a racist. He just doesn’t like white people.
How else to explain Carranza’s “presentation slide,” unearthed by the NY Post, which advises educators how to “dismantle racism,” which Carranza defines as “White Supremacy Culture.”
What is White Supremacy Culture? To Carranza, it’s “perfectionism,” objectivity, individualism and “Worship of the Written Word.”
You might consider these to be positive traits. Not Carranza.
His presentation slide defines “perfectionism” as “giving undue focus to the shortcomings of someone or their work or viewing them as personal flaws.Making a mistake is confused with being a mistake, doing wrong with being wrong” — whatever that means.
Objectivity “can lead to the belief that there is an ultimate truth and that alternative viewpoints or emotions are bad. It’s even inherent in ‘the belief that there is such a thing as being objective” — whatever that also means.
As for individualism: “This idea is found among people who have little experience or comfort working as part of a team. It can lead to isolation, and emphasize competition over cooperation.”
Worship of the written word “prioritizes documentation and writing skills, rather than the ‘ability to relate to others.’ It also leads to teaching that there is ‘only one right way to do something.’”
White Supremacy Culture also includes “Fear of Open Conflict,” which “comes through when someone overemphasizes politeness, and equates broaching touchy subjects with being rude. The response is to blame the person for raising the issue rather than to look at the issue which is actually causing the problem.’”
Finally, there’s a “Sense of Urgency,” which appears to sum up Carranza’s thinking: “Sacrificing interests of communities of color to win victories for white people.”
And, yes, this is the same guy who, referring to the large number of Asian students who attend the city's elite high schools, made the borderline racist remark earlier this year that “I don’t buy into the narrative that any one ethnic group owns admissions” to these elite schools. Owns admissions? Asians hardly “own” anything. Carranza is apparently ignorant of the fact that the USA brutally discriminated against Asians as much as any other non-white group.
Mayor de Blasio should have fired Carranza then. He can’t now. With stars in his eyes and rocks in his head, he’s bopping around Iowa, South Carolina and Nevada, imagining himself as a presidential candidate. He also doesn’t seem crazy about white people — unless they are “working people” or contribute to his political campaigns.
Now let’s turn to the agency that’s keeping the mayor from political oblivion because of the city's continued low crime rate, the NYPD. Some view the department as run by a group of white guys, most of whom are Irish. There are the top three honchos, Commissioner Jim O’Neill, Chief of Department Terence Monahan, and Chief of Detectives Dermot Shea. Not to mention O’Neill’s two predecessors, Bill Bratton and Ray Kelly. Can’t get much more Irish than that.
Last week, at a presentation detailing the city’s falling crime rate, Your Humble Servant asked Monahan whether a culture of white supremacy runs through the NYPD. Monahan may lack Carranza’s Master’s of Education with Distinction in Educational Leadership from Northern Arizona University but he possesses a quality Carranza lacks: common sense. He offered a predictably sensible — though not necessarily accurate — one-word answer: “No.”
